A Black Tudor?

A lot of the PC "integration" of TV and movies is being done to promote political correctness, but the dirty little secret is that in the past, often minorities (racial, religious, and ethnic minorities) were ignored in historical films.

Example: The joke of "Blazing Saddles" was a black sheriff, but the reality was that blacks  were present in the west, but were "whitewashed" out of traditional western films: For example, the inspiration for "the Lone Ranger" may well have been Bass Reeves, a Black sheriff who learned several Amerindian dialects and worked to clean up "Indian Territory", aka Oklahoma, after the civil war... 

So if you are watching Starz "The Spanish Princess", you might be startled to see that one of the women in Princess Katherine's entourage was black, and part of the plot is her romance with another Moor who is a soldier who also came with the Princess to England.



And yes, that is actually true.



From The Decider:

When you think of Tudor England, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and bloody beheadings probably spring to mind. That’s thanks to countless dramatic adaptations and docu-series about those dramatic days. One thing that’s often been cut from the narrative, though, are the people of color whom historians know lived in London and contributed to the Royal Courts of the day.

Starz’s The Spanish Princess is trying to amend this by putting the Moorish members of Catherine of Aragon’s court front and center in the story. Stephanie Levi-John co-stars in the series as Lina, Catherine’s real life lady-in-waiting, whom we know was a woman of color blooming in the courts of the Tudor rose.

“Hundreds of people of color lived and worked quite happily with the indigenous English people in that period,” The Spanish Princess writer and executive producer Matthew Graham told Decider during Winter TCA. “Lina was real, she married Oviedo. We wanted to tell their story, because their story definitely existed, it was just in the sidebar of history.”

much of her story is based on composites of other women, since little is known about her private life.

refinery29 notes:

Like most of the other characters in The Spanish Princess, Catalina “Lina” de Cardonnes is based on a real person. Only three things are known about Lina. First, that she served as Catherine of Aragon's lady-in-waiting for 26 years, weathering the many years Catherine spent cast-aside and destitute. Second, that she Lina married a Moorish crossbow-maker man named Oviedo, who is played by another charismatic stand-out, Aaron Cobham. Third, that she was a Black woman.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF STARZ ENTERTAINMENT/IMDB

The presence of people of African ethnicity in London during Elizabethan times was brought to the attention of many recently when a document was found discussing if they should be deported .... 

However, it is not certain this was done (Indeed, one historian has extensively documented the lives of 200 people of colour in Elizabethan London)...
and since many may have been Muslim may have worked both for and against them, since this historian notes many converted to Protestantism during Elizabeth's time.

BBC's History Extra has an article about England's complicated relationship with Islam, the Barbary Pirates, the Ottoman Empire, and Spain during Tudor times, and how this alliance with Islamic countries influenced Elizabethan culture, from Shakespeare's Othello to sugar, spices silks, and Persian carpets.